Why Go Back to the Moon?

One of the world’s largest rockets waits, probably impatiently, on its launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center, poised to return humans to the Moon for the first time in 50 years. This is NASA’s Artemis II mission, which will send four astronauts around the Moon and back, laying the groundwork for a lunar landing in the coming years.

Americans may be asking: Why is the United States going back to the Moon? The answer rests on three main reasons, all of which relate to its strategic value: its location, its natural resources, and the risk of ceding generational preeminence in space to China if the United States fails to take one more giant step for mankind.

During the Cold War, the United States went to the Moon to beat the Soviets. National honor was at stake. The United States won. The Soviets lost. Mission accomplished, NASA shuttered its crewed lunar program after Apollo 17. No human has been to the Moon since 1972. Not even one uncrewed probe visited the Moon during the 1980s. However, it was impossible to ignore indefinitely the key role the Moon would play in the future.

The Artemis program, the United States’ return to the Moon, is step one of a long-term vision that envisions humans living beyond Earth orbit. The Moon is the central element of that plan because of its location. All roads to the cosmos naturally lead through the Moon. The Moon is the best place for NASA to test new technologies and figure out how to sustain human life far from Earth, preparing for future missions to Mars and beyond.

Science will be conducted from the Moon, but there are better places in the Solar System to look for scientific discoveries—the Moon will serve as a jumping-off point for many of those expeditions. Possibly within decades, lunar infrastructure will serve as a key waystation and transit hub—like a service plaza on an interstellar toll road—for journeys between the Earth and beyond.

The Moon is also important because of its natural resources. Today, transporting the materials needed to support space activities into orbit, let alone to deep space, is expensive. SpaceX is advertising a price of $220,000 per pound to the Moon—a bargain. Water ice on the Moon can be broken down and used for a variety of purposes, such as manufacturing propellant. Other resources, like oxygen, hydrogen, and metals, are also found there and could be used in situ to sustain human activity at scale.

Some resources on the Moon are valuable enough to justify extraction and return to Earth. Lunar rocks from the Apollo program contained rare earth elements, which are used in a wide range of modern electronics. Other compounds, like helium-3, which is uncommon on Earth but found in large amounts on the Moon, could play a key role in advancing quantum technologies.

Although China had only recently sent its first astronaut into space when President George W. Bush in 2004 announced U.S. plans—the predecessor to the Artemis program—to return to the Moon, China is now a space power impossible to ignore. It is also the United States’ main geopolitical competitor. China plans to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, build a base, and establish a network of lunar infrastructure. For China, the Moon is the keystone in its ambitions to extend and strengthen its influence in space.

Geopolitical dynamics shape the urgency of the United States’ return to the Moon, but the primary rationale lies in the Moon’s intrinsic strategic value. Whether it be in 10 years or 50 years, humans will travel from Earth to populate other places in space. The Moon holds inestimable value to humankind as part of that journey, a value that will become most clear in time. The Moon is a step to Mars and beyond.

In his famous 1962 speech, President John F. Kennedy laid out to the nation why we were going to the Moon. He asked: “Why climb the highest mountain? Why . . . fly the Atlantic? . . . We choose [to do these things] not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Going to the Moon was a manifestation of the “best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.” The United States is going back to the Moon—and staying—for the same reasons today.

As a nation, the United States plays a key role in how the story of humanity’s journey in the cosmos unfolds, as it has since the 1950s. It has played the same role in world events over the last 250 years. As President Theodore Roosevelt once observed: “We have no choice, we people of the United States, as to whether or not we shall play a great part in the world. That has been determined for us by fate. . . . All that we can decide is whether we shall play it well or ill.” The United States’ role in humanity’s next chapter in space starts on the Moon and begins with Artemis.

Clayton Swope is the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project and a senior fellow in the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.